The sun was setting when Emrys turned back toward the village. He then sensed several auras heading toward the village and immediately went on guard.
It's not over? There are more of them?
Eventually, focusing hard enough and refusing to let the tension get to him, Emrys realized these were just humans. Kids, even.
At one point the group of children stopped and scanned their surroundings, no doubt because of the fairy and giant corpses scattered nearby.
Emrys walked toward them to give them the same instructions he'd given the rest of the villagers.
"Hello there, kids," Emrys said, planting himself in front of them.
The children, only now noticing his presence, instantly went on guard. Some drew daggers, others even nocked their bows.
"Rou, you and your friends, please calm down," he told them. "As you can see, something happened in the village, and I'm sure you already know what I'm talking about. Head to the announcement square, we've got a lot to talk about."
Emrys didn't wait for their reaction and walked off.
The announcement square sat at the center of the village, right in front of the chief's house. It was, quite literally, the place designed for making announcements to the whole village, so it had to be able to hold a large number of people. And yet today, it was packed.
Emrys didn't know why, but whoever had designed it had surely never imagined it would one day need to hold absolutely the entire village at once.
"Are you all here?" Emrys asked, his voice carrying effortlessly over the noise.
No one really answered. A few heads nodded. A baby started crying louder somewhere in the back, and its mother muttered an apology to no one in particular before stepping away to rock it.
Joran stood in the front row, arms crossed, his face grayer than usual. Beside him, Lira kept a hand resting on the shoulder of a man Emrys didn't know, probably her husband, his eyes fixed on the ground.
"Before anything else, I wanted to introduce myself," Emrys said, addressing the crowd. "Hello everyone, my name is Faker."
When he made that revelation, the entire village was stunned. Aside from a few who had already recognized him, none of them had ever seen him in person, but all of them had heard the rumors.
"What?"
"Is this a joke?"
"The Faker?"
Emrys's fame had grown so immense among humankind that no human was more renowned than him in all of history, except for King Carfen.
He didn't really know where to begin. He'd imagined a dozen different ways to say this while running from one wounded person to the next, and none of them seemed any less brutal than the others.
"Alright, let's keep it simple. Fondval was just attacked by Stigma," he finally said.
The silence that followed didn't even last two seconds.
"What?"
"What do you mean, Stigma?"
"That's impossible, Stigma protects us, it's written on every banner—"
"My daughter nearly died, are you saying it was our own people who—"
Emrys raised a hand, not forcefully, not like he was demanding silence, more like someone asking for a second of patience from someone who already had a lot to process.
"Let me finish."
That didn't fully calm them down, but enough for the volume to drop below that of a riot and settle into something more like an undertow.
"It really was Stigma soldiers who attacked you. Giants, fairies, all of them under the command of a goddess. They're all dead now, if that's any comfort. But they weren't acting at random." He paused, searching for the words. "They'd received a report that a demon was hiding here."
This time the silence was different. Heavier. Longer.
Then someone, way in the back, let out a nervous laugh, almost uncontrollable. "A demon? Here, in Fondval? You're joking."
"I'm not joking."
"Then where is it, this demon," a burly man called out, one of the few still holding a pitchfork he apparently hadn't let go of since the attack. "Show it to us, if you're so sure of yourself."
Emrys turned his head slightly toward Joran.
He said nothing. He didn't need to.
Everyone's eyes followed his, and a murmur began spreading through the crowd, almost physical, like a wave starting at the front row and dying out somewhere in the back of the square.
"Joran?"
"No, that's absurd, Joran is—"
"Why are you looking at him?"
Joran didn't move. He just stood there, arms still crossed, staring at Emrys with something caught between resignation and anger.
"You didn't have to," he finally said, his voice hoarse.
"Yes, I did," Emrys answered. "Those who attacked the village already knew. I don't enjoy doing this, but they have a right to know. They nearly died because of it."
A man in the second row, in his thirties, his face still marked with soot, stepped forward. "Joran. Tell me it's not true."
Joran didn't answer right away.
"It's true," he finally said.
The word hung in the air for a moment before the square outright exploded.
"YOU HID A DEMON IN YOUR HOME?"
"Since when?"
"My wife died last year from a fever, we didn't even have enough to pay for a decent doctor, and you, you were feeding a monster in secret—"
"He's not a monster," a younger voice cut in, trembling but firm.
Rou.
The boy had wormed his way to the front row, fists clenched, face red, clearly ready to fight anyone who dared keep talking like that.
"He's never hurt anyone. He even helps out sometimes, when he thinks no one's watching."
"Rou, be quiet," Joran murmured, a hand on his shoulder, but the boy pulled away.
"No! They should know! He fixes fences at night, he fed and nursed Bern's horse back to health when everyone thought it was going to die, he—"
"Bern's horse," someone repeated, incredulous, as if that specific detail had just flipped something over in their head without them quite knowing which way it had landed.
Bern himself, the blacksmith, stayed silent for a long moment, his gaze moving from Rou to Joran, then to some vague point behind them, somewhere toward the isolated little house.
"I didn't have the money to treat it back then, at some point I even stopped feeding it, but it suddenly started getting better. I tried to figure out what had happened, but I never found anything," he finally said.
The crowd kept buzzing, fragmenting into small parallel conversations, some turning to their neighbors to seek confirmation or contradiction, others simply frozen, unable to decide what to think.
That's when the door of the little house, all the way down the street, opened.
He stepped out slowly, his hood pulled back this time, making no attempt to hide, his white fur and his face fully exposed for everyone to see. He walked toward the square with a hesitant gait, each stride seeming to cost him an immense effort.
A ripple of recoil ran through the crowd, almost like a single organism, one collective step back.
"I'm sorry," he said, stopping a few meters away, his voice low but audible in the settled silence. "I'm truly, truly sorry. If I'd known my presence here could put you in danger like this, I would have left long ago. I should have left long ago."
"Then why didn't you," someone called out, not unkindly, just exhausted, worn down by a day that wouldn't end.
"Because I asked him to stay," Joran answered, before the demon could find his words. "We found him in the forest, a few months ago, half dead. His own kind were hunting him down because he refused to take part in the fighting. We figured someone who'd rather die than cause harm maybe deserved a little more consideration than a summary execution."
No one found anything to say to that right away.
An old woman, sitting on a stool someone must have brought her, the same one Emrys had treated earlier for a gash on her arm, let out a long, trembling sigh.
"I lost two sons in this war," she said, her voice barely louder than a whisper, yet it carried all the way to the back of the square, the silence had grown so thick. "Killed by demons, or so I was told. So you'll understand I don't hold any particular fondness for your kind."
She looked at the demon for a long moment, her eyes narrowed with age and exhaustion.
"But I heard clearly what Joran just said. And I saw that business with the horse myself too, last winter. I remember thinking it was strange."
She fell silent, letting the weight of it settle a little longer, before adding, almost reluctantly: "It doesn't change my grief. But maybe it changes something about what I should do with it."
Emrys stayed silent, letting the square breathe, letting people look at each other, whisper things, hesitate out loud.
"And you?" the man with the pitchfork finally called out, turning to Emrys with an aggressiveness that hadn't fully faded. "You think just because you're Faker you can waltz in and decide what we should do with our own village?"
"I'm not deciding anything," Emrys answered. "I'm just telling you what happened. What you do with it is up to you."
"You're the one who killed Stigma's soldiers."
"Yes. And destroyed their base too."
"So you're a wanted man now. Probably us too, if others come to check up on things."
"That's possible."
The man stayed silent for a moment, pitchfork still in hand, visibly no longer sure what to do with his anger now that it had no clear target left to aim at.
Another man further back timidly raised his hand.
"Will... will it come back? Stigma, I mean. Will they try again?"
It was the question everyone seemed to be carrying without daring to voice it, and the silence that followed said more than any cry of anger could have.
"I don't know," Emrys answered, honestly, because he had no wish to lie right now, no wish to add a false promise on top of everything already said that morning. "I've got no idea how much importance Stigma placed on that base, but given the firepower I used to destroy it, they'll probably send someone to investigate."
A new murmur rippled through the crowd, more worried this time than angry.
"So what are we supposed to do," Lira asked, speaking for the first time since it all began, her voice surprisingly calm amid all the chaos. "We can't just stay here waiting for them to come back and finish the job."
"No," Emrys admitted. "You can't."
He let the sentence hang in the air a moment, feeling the weight of dozens of eyes on him, all waiting for him to hand them a solution.
"I might have an idea," he finally said. "But give me time to think it through properly. We'll talk again tomorrow morning. For now, you all need to rest."
That didn't fully satisfy anyone, but no one pushed further either, the exhaustion and shock of the day catching up with everyone all at once, as if finally getting an explanation, however terrible, had been enough to let the tension that had held the square upright finally drain away.
The crowd began to disperse slowly, in small clusters, some carefully avoiding Joran's eyes, others approaching instead to rest a hand on his shoulder without a word.
The demon stood motionless in the middle of the square long after most people had gone home, as if still waiting for a verdict that might never actually come.
Rou and his group of friends came to stand beside him, silent, and Rou gently took his hand.
When everyone had left, Emrys removed his mask and armor, then let out a deep sigh.
"Sight.It was a really shitty day. I really hope tomorrow will be better."